More than 100 Cambridge Health Alliance physicians, medical education leaders, and current and former students convened for a reunion and national education symposium to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the Harvard Medical School-Cambridge Integrated Clerkship (CIC). The CIC program is an innovative redesign of medical students’ third-year clerkship experience at CHA that has been important and influential nationwide and worldwide at pressing clinical educational transformation forward. The festivities took place at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge on April 12-13.

The event’s workshops, roundtable discussions, and lectures created a “think tank” and provided a dialogue across an array of critical topics such as student and trainer experiences, “next generation” innovations of the CIC model, the data demonstrating program successes, and the future of medical education. It drew educational leaders from institutions near and far, including the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), University of Pennsylvania, Mayo Medical School, University of Toronto’s Wilson Centre for Research in Education, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Penn State Hershey College of Medicine, and Harvard Medical School, among others. Participants also included renowned leaders from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, the American Medical Association, the Lown Institute, the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, and the Arnold P. Gold Foundation.

“CHA’s team has led real change in clinical education. We believed that excellence in care and humanism would make a difference,” said David Hirsh, MD (pictured left), one of the program’s founders.

The event was a wonderful opportunity to reflect on the success and impact of the CIC model and harness the ideas and energies of the participants to continue advancing medical education transformation.